CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Art teacher Jayne Sylvester and one of her students stumbled over a slice of history a year ago as they rummaged through cast-off items at Glenville High School's library, hunting for unusual objects to turn into artsy robots.

Inside a slim box of reel-to-reel tape, in a pile of stuff to be discarded, they found a little-known recording of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in Glenville's auditorium on April 26, 1967. A year later, he was killed by an assassin's bullet.

Now, after being rescued from the trash heap, the recording of King's stirring speech is being readied for use as a social studies lesson at Glenville and other Cleveland schools.

"It's like a lost treasure. It will be absolutely wonderful for the kids to hear," said Doris Redic, a Glenville principal who plans to incorporate the speech into the school's Black History Month program next month.

That's happy news for two teachers who have labored, each in her own way, to expose Cleveland youths to the enthralling speech.

"I have been shouting it to the wind . . . and nobody seemed to care," said Sylvester, who had hoped to put on a Glenville event spotlighting the tape but was transferred to another school before she could organize it.

Unbeknownst to her, the Glenville speech had another advocate -- Pearl Livingstone, a retired Brecksville teacher who since 1967 has kept a cherished audiotape of it. It was given to her by a neighbor who was a Glenville administrator at the time.

View full sizeKing's speech was the lead story in the next day's Plain Dealer. Read that story, and a second one about a speech he gave at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church.

Livingstone said that she's long known the audio was an important artifact but that she could never figure out how to help it win the attention it deserved.

"It's such an inspiring speech. When I listen to it now, I get chills," said Livingstone, who for years played the speech on a reel-to-reel player when she taught about King, to let students hear his booming voice and soaring oratory.

In 2009, Livingstone had the speech burned onto a CD and gave it to a handful of Cleveland teachers, many of whom told her they'd never known King had spoken at Glenville High.

"It's a very special part of Cleveland history," Livingstonesaid. "He's talking to these students who are going to be faced with all kinds of problems and he's telling them the way to overcome is to be the best."

In a speech punctuated with poetry, King appealeddirectly to Glenville students and urged them to shun violence. Instead, seize opportunities, he advised them, pointing out that the doors to education and careers were just beginning to swing open for black Americans.

Sylvester said she's been fascinated by the mysterious reel ever since she and student L.A. Littlejohn found it in the fall of 2010. Plainly marked with a label saying it was a tape of Martin Luther King at Glenville, the cream-colored box was in a pile of things the library was throwing out, she said.

Curious, Sylvester and Littlejohn fished it out of the pile, but they had no way of listening since it was in an outdated reel-to-reel format.

Kinney, a Case Western Reserve University alumnus, offered to pay to have the audio transferred to CD, and early in 2011 he took the reel to a digital media specialist at CWRU.

Jared Bendis, creative new media officer at the university's Kelvin Smith Library, said that as soon as he threaded the tape into a machine and pressed play, a familiar voice rang out in what he called "full-glory, capture-the-room, voice-reverberating, give-you-chills Dr. King."

Stunned, he called for his co-workers to come and listen, too. "You've got to get in here," he remembers saying. "At one point, five or six gathered around."

Bendis is still amazed at the quality of the recording. "It was crisp. It was like he was in the room, it was that haunting and chilling."

When he finished transferring the tape to CD, Bendis refused to take any payment.

King's speech, annotated

Other ways to listen

If the video above doesn't work for you, or you'd like to listen to shorter excerpts, audio-only players are included below. Direct links to the audio files are at the end of the story.

John Basalla, audiovisual archivist for the Cleveland School District, said he's pleased to learn that tapes were made of King's Glenville speech. "This is not just a valuable find for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District -- this is a find for Cleveland."

When asked how such a valuable item could have ended up in the trash, Basalla replied, "I can't speak to how it got to wherever it got because I wasn't there, but I'm glad they still exist.

"All I would say is it's a surprising find, and I'm glad it's preserved," he said, adding that the tape clearly was stored properly to have survived for nearly 45years.

It's not as shocking as it sounds to find such things in the garbage, local historians say. Significant items are rescued from the trash all the time, said Bill Barrow, special-collections librarian at Cleveland State University.

Many valuable photographs and documents have been discovered by people tossing things out as they clean homes of the deceased, Barrowsaid. A film that can now be viewed on CSU's Cleveland Memory Project website, documenting the building of the Terminal Tower complex, was found in a rusty can at a New York flea market, Barrow said with a laugh.

Hear the speech (21:02)

Full audio recording of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Glenville High School speech, 1967. (For shorter excerpts, select from the clips below.)

Black is beautiful (0:29)

"I am somebody ... I am black, but I am black and beautiful."

Streetsweeper (1:23)

"If it falls your lot to be a streetsweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures."

Somebodiness (0:53)

"Develop within ourselves a deep sense of somebodiness. Don't let anybody make you feel that you are nobody."

Nonviolence (1:05)

"Our power does not lie in Molotov cocktails ... Our power lies in our ability to say nonviolently that we aren't gonna take it any longer."

Littlejohn, now a student at Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania, said he "had a lot of emotions" after hearing the speech, colored with anecdotes from the segregated South.

At one point in the speech, King says that while he had to sit in the back of a Georgia school bus as a boy, he always "left my mind on the front seat. And I said to myself, 'One of these days, I'm going to put my body up there where my mind is.' "

Littlejohn said King's words caused him to reflect deeply. "It was way different from back then to here in the 21st century. He had a lot of powerful words."

Sylvester and Littlejohn said they think King's moving speech is an instant history lesson for Cleveland students, one made moremeaningful by the fact that it was recorded at Glenville High. They'd hoped to have a big listening party to celebrate their find.

Then Littlejohn left for college last fall and Sylvester was transferred to another school. "We all lost each other," Sylvester said.

Yet as word of the resurrectedrecording spreads, Cleveland school officials are now saying they plan to put it to good use.

Gayle Gadison, who manages the social studies curriculum for Cleveland public elementary schools, said she learned of the recording's existence in October.

On Thursday, she played the speech at a meeting of the district's social studies teachers and discussed ways to incorporate it in their classes. It's a great tool for teaching about the civil rights era, she said.

Most students have limited knowledge of the civil rights era, Gadison said. They know only "Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and 'I Have a Dream,' " she said. "That's their civil rights repertoire. And so, just to expand this, that's really something."

And retired teacher Livingstone is thrilled that King's words finally will be heard in Cleveland classrooms.

It's something she's long wanted. Livingstone, who now registers voters through her organization, Northeastern Ohio Voter Advocates, has handed out CDs of the speech for the past two years as a thank-you to teachers who register 18-year-olds at their schools.

"It would be very inspiring [for students] to know that at their school, in the Cleveland school system, this great hero spoke," Livingstone said. "He was one of the heroes of the century."

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